The Worst Room in Your House

The room is white. Blinding white, overexposed, dazzling. A dozen pale textures: shaggy, shellacked, shiny white. The camera sweeps through, past the white sectional to a white piano where the bookshelves used to be. Past the art on the walls: white canvases in white frames. There's no color at all–until the strings swell, and the camera rolls over on its back like a dead dolphin to show the undulating rainbow of books across the ceiling.

The books are organized by color in a gradient. Each hangs spine-down in its own little hammock. There are six hundred of them, hung at softly varying heights, like the inside of a mouth. The camera rights itself, pulls back to show the full effect: the white room with its book rainbow gently swaying above it. Just then, a wheeled stepladder rolls into frame from the dining room. Perched upon it, exhausted but triumphant: me.

I beam as I roll across the floor, reaching above my head to pluck a single book from its hammock, as the stepladder eases to a stop near a pallid ottoman. "What could be easier than picking your next book while lying on your sofa?" I chirp. "Just look up, and there they are." I haven't slept in four days.

The clients aren’t here. We’ll splice their reactions in later. This shot is too difficult. It’s the fourteenth take. The hammocks are clingy. The books catch on them. The casual snatch while rolling, eyes forward, sliding sideways, is nearly impossible. I worked for hours on the wheels of the ladder, trying eight different brands of casters before I found one that would glide like a moonwalker.

But the reveal will work.

It will look impossible. The clients’ living room was long and narrow. It was the worst room in their house. Built-in bookshelves made it a hallway. The clients wanted it to feel sunny and open. I pulled the curtains to make it look dimmer, claustrophobic. The camera trudged around, finding cramped angles.

During the build, it got worse. We demolished the built-ins; the wall collapsed behind them. We were behind schedule and over budget. The camera found me in the middle of the night, hunched over my sewing machine, working on a mysterious project. "I don't know if this will work," I whispered, wide-eyed.

But this morning I’ve pulled it off. Not just victory but magic, from the jaws of defeat.

The clients are ecstatic. It’s nice when they like it. They don’t mind the difficulty of accessing the glowworm cavern of literature on their ceiling. They’re more book displayers than book readers. They'll enjoy pointing up at them. “Did I tell you about when Clarice came to do our living room?” they'll tell their future guests. “From the show, yes! She's such a creative genius. Look what she did!”

My success rests on this moment. The reveal must be not only successful but overpowering. It must inspire awe. Every time, it must be more fantastic than the viewer’s wildest dreams.

In the early days of the show, it was a custom-built cat castle. A plant wall. The producers were happy. They wanted more. More impact, more panache. Make it pop. When I built a naval-themed den, they asked if I could make it seem as though we were inside a whale. We ribbed the walls. When the owners were chefs, I built a gabled roof vegetable garden, the lettuce flopping at forty-five-degree angles. There was a dining room fed by pneumatic tubes. The timeframe remained the same. My crew is minimal; I've found no one whose work is up to my standards. In season two I built a staircase that goes outside the house and back in. A bedroom was all waterbed, with koi inside. A playroom like an inside-out mirror ball. My hands were wrapped in bloody gauze for the reveal. I held them down, out of the frame. I went home and slept for thirty hours.

How long will I sleep this time? I’m dozing on the subway home, hanging like dry cleaning from the handrail. I barely remember the ride.

I kick magazines to the side as I slip into my apartment, pushing the towel back under the door again as I close it. Always there are magazines. They form a shambling mountain. A chair has been subsumed under them. I flick on a floor lamp, sullen, urine-yellow.

The part of the room not given to magazines is blanketed with fast food remains. Wrappers, cartons, cups. Bones, buns, festering guacamole. As I walk, my feet make a gentle shushing noise through the cellophane, like wading in a stream. I stumble when I step on a chicken bone. I'm aware, technically, that the smell is offensive. There have been complaints. The towel is to keep the odor in. Here, with me.

I strip down to my underwear. My suit is neatly placed on the one tidy chair. The clothing chair. The clothes will go out to be cleaned. They'll come back wrapped in plastic. They'll be protected from this place. No one will know.

I sink onto a squelching couch. Crinkling noises under me. I turn on the television. I can only see the top left corner over the magazines. It doesn't matter. I stare at the glowing corner, reach blindly into the mass of wrappers until my fingers find something that feels like food. It's important not to look at it. It may look distressing. My body won't mind, usually. It will be processed. I shovel it in, staring at the TV corner. Chewing with my mouth open.

Later, I stumble into my bedroom. The walls are covered with plans, blueprints, scotch taped. The windows are sealed with plywood. If I wake up I'll drag myself to my desk and scribble ideas. What if a dog shelter were to hire me to improve their cages. What if a dentist's waiting room. A nursing home? I'll send some of these plans to the producers. Some they send back with notes. “What could you do to make this really pop?” they ask. Others are sent back without notes, or not returned at all.

I fall face-first onto my bed and a switch inside my head clicks, like a balloon popping. I'm unconscious.

Some period of time later I'm at the next home, blinking. The home is very windowed. The clients love plants. The wife is a fan of the show. She's submitted a dozen times. The title under her name will read “Plant Parent.” She'd like for their bedroom to be transformed into a tropical oasis.

During the build, I discover that the floor is rotten. It's days away from disintegrating, sending the master bed crashing through the downstairs ceiling. “I don't know how I can fix this,” I moan into the camera, balanced on floor joists, the dining table visible below my feet. Late that night, I'm filmed from behind tugging wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow upstairs. It isn't clear what's inside as it thunks-thunks-thunks up.

Two days later the clients are staggered by what they see. I've transformed their bedroom into a jungle. Huge fronds sway in the mist. I appear from the undergrowth like Dr. Livingston. “I hope you don't mind,” I say, brushing past leaves the size of my body. “I went a little wild.”

The clients clap their hands to their cheeks. Their mouths open in shocked O's. “How did you do this?” gasps the wife. “It's like paradise!”

I beckon them through, pushing past the greenery, down a wooden walkway in the center of the room to their bed, now suspended from the ceiling by what looks like vines. “I'll feel like Tarzan in this,” says the husband, looking at the camera.

The wife is squinting. It's hard to get an exact read on the room, through the fog and foliage. She steps back a bit, and almost loses her balance as her heels sink into the dirt.

Of course it's dirt. I didn't replace the flooring at all. I laid a rubber foundation and a six-inch bed of dirt, embedded grow lights in the ceiling, and planted tropicals. There are hundreds of them. Some of them are more accurately trees.

The wife pinwheels to retain her balance. Her eyes widen, meeting mine. There’s an awkward silence. “My God,” she says to me finally. “Clarice, what have you done?”

She presses her fingers into the bed. “The sheets are damp,” she says. She waves her hand to dissipate the haze for a moment. “Everything in here must be wet. Did you install industrial humidifiers? I can barely see, Clarice! Mildew will grow everywhere. Black mold in the walls. You'll destroy our house.”

I look down. I have no explanation, no smooth-talking reassurances. I've simply given this no thought at all. I've been focused on the work. I've been thinking about the reveal. There's an awkward silence now, and I tilt my head a little. I have no earthly idea what to say. She comes over to me and grips my upper arms. Her voice quiets and softens. There's something almost like pity in it. “How could you do this?” she asks.

“I'm sorry,” I say, still avoiding her eyes. “I wanted to surprise you.” The producers will need to do some editing here. This part will be cut.

“This is my actual bedroom,” she says. “This is my life. I have to go to work tomorrow. These are my sheets. I can't sleep on wet sheets.”

I say nothing. Can she sleep on wet sheets? I'm trying to think back to my apartment. Are my sheets wet? I think that they have been.

She's searching my face. “I've been such a fan,” she says. “I was so excited. But this isn't a room for living in, Clarice.”

I still don't know what to say, so I stay silent. Behind us, the cameras have turned off. Men take their headphones off. They know none of this will be usable. They're packing up and going home.

She's looking around again, with a kind of bafflement. “Was there a way to feed the koi in the waterbed room?” she asks, suddenly.

I jerk backwards. I don't like this, I want to leave. She pursues me down the walkway and I dodge sideways, into the jungle. I push through the undergrowth, walking on the joists, back to the corner of the room, crouching down, cowering. She doesn't follow. She doesn't want to get stuck in the dirt again.

I can see her silhouette through the mist. We're alone now. The crew are gone. I don't know where the husband is. We stay there for a period of time. I lose track. I've become a poor judge of time. I watch her shadow on the walkway. I don't know if she can see me or not.

Finally she stalks back towards the bed, and I slip out and run away.

On the subway, on the way home, I feel edgy. I try to calm myself by drawing. Plans for a home dug down into the earth, with stairs that twist like DNA strands beneath skylights.

A little boy is sitting two seats away. He cranes his neck to see what I'm drawing. He scooches over next to me, breathing through his mouth, looming his face over what I'm drawing and blocking my view. His mother ignores him, eyes on her phone. He looks up when I stop sketching.

“That looks cool,” he says.

“It's meant to be underground,” I tell him.

“Yeah, it's cool. You should put a trap at the bottom.”

“A trap!” I let out a short, high-pitched laugh. He glances up to see if he's in trouble, and then laughs with me.

“Like a pit full of spikes, right here,” he says, pointing to the base of the double helix.

“That would be the worst room in the castle,” I tell him. “I love it.”

“Right here, there could be like a secret door that opens,” he says.

“It's made of teeth, and if you turn the key the wrong way, it devours you.”

“It eats your soul and leaves your body in a heap!”

“It drops you to the center of the earth!”

He looks up at me, picking at a scab on his elbow. There's a pause, and then he says: “Sometimes I pretend the subway is like a worm twisting through the ground.”

“Sometimes I imagine it fired out of a cannon, arcing through the air to the next station.”

“Excuse me,” says his mother, looking up. “Michael–come over here.” He shifts away, looking back at me guiltily.

“Sorry,” I mumble, meeting her eyes for a fraction of a second before looking down. “He has a good imagination.”

“She's making an underground castle!” he says. “There's a door with teeth!”

“Don't talk to my kid,” she says. She tugs him closer to her.

Some days later, I meet my cameraman on the sidewalk and knock on a new door. The man who opens it looks shocked and frightened. They all do when I surprise them, two weeks before they'd expected me. I have to ambush them, or they'll have the place cleaned and my transformation won't be as impressive. Thursday evening after dinner is when the average American home is at its worst. There's something different about this man's reaction, though. He looks like he might vomit.

I understand when he allows me in. I can barely edge down the hallway. It's lined with cardboard boxes, stacked to the ceiling, split at the corners. The dining room table can't be seen. Stacks of dishes cover half of it. The rest is magazines, stacked and sagging, tied with twine.

He doesn't apologize as he guides me up to the worst room, in the attic. We stoop under the low ceiling. He sits on the bed next to his wife. They're young, in their thirties. Attractive. Childless. The bed is just a frame, and half of it is buried under heaps of clothes. There are cats–I can smell the litterboxes–but I can't see them.

Every inch of the sloped ceiling is covered with art. There is no theme, no period, no style. Each frame is different than the one it's nestled against. Landscapes, portraits, abstract prints, a high-contrast photograph of a man surfing, an oil painting of a fish, the word “IMAGINE.” I'm not sure how they've attached them to the slopes. Nails? The effect is striking. I imagine a ballroom with a two-story wall like this. It could work. “We like the stars,” he's saying.

“The stars?” I ask. I don't know if he's talking about people or what.

“Yes, the–in space,” she says. She points up. I squat down on the sad carpet, to make my eyeline lower than theirs, to make them more comfortable. I'm a celebrity. People get intimidated, sometimes. It helps to get low.

“We used to play in the back yard,” he says. “But the neighbors didn't like it, after a while.”

“What did you play?” I ask. I have no idea. Football, for all I know. Charades.

“Music.”

“Ah,” I say.

There's a pause. They glance at each other and I see the muscles in his neck tighten. She tightens her lips. Her hands flutter, a tiny gesture of helplessness. I've been thinking about the ballroom. I suppose they're waiting on me. I don't care, but there's footage to be shot. “Could you show me how you play in the back yard?” I ask.

His face lights up; hers is more cautious. “We'll get in trouble with the neighbors,” she says.

“Just for a moment,” I say. “It's a 'before' shot. We need to show the problem we're solving.”

She nods, smiling, and they lead us out back.

I thought maybe it would be loud. They could be rappers, or drummers. But they're violists, both of them. Their back lawn is checkered loosely with lopsided concrete squares, asterisks of crabgrass between them, sagging chain-link fences around. They stand in the middle with the setting sun behind them, facing each other. They look at each other and each inhale at the same time, and then their bows come down.

It's a pretty duet. It twines upwards into the dusk. I don't process music, but this seems skilled and unobjectionable. I'm leaning against the back wall of their house, looking out over the yard. There's a stack of rotting wooden pallets in one corner. There's a pile of shit on one of the pavers. The cats again, I suppose. I could build those cats such a castle. But I understand: this isn’t about the music. It’s about the players. Her phone buzzes halfway through the song and she stops abruptly, her bow screeching off the strings. “It's them,” she says quietly. “We should stop.”

I'm sketching plans for their attic, later, back at my apartment. They want to see the stars at night. I could make skylights. The roof could be made of glass. One big skylight. No roof at all? A retractable roof? I can't remember the last time I ate. I rummage through the wrappers, but I can find nothing. My fingers scrabble around, find each other. There's a raised scab on my knuckle. I raise it to my teeth and gnaw it off. There's a sharp pain around the edges as it tears the skin it had adhered to. It's gummy, iron-tasting. It probably has nutritional qualities. I chew off a scab on my other hand as well, before stumbling into my bedroom. 

The roof will open like a jack-in-the-box. The floor will rise on hydraulic cylinders to the roof line, so they can get close to the stars.

The producers write back. They love it! But how can I really make it pop?

It's late on the final night of the build, and I'm testing. The camera is below me, watching me rise. The roof reveal works, the two halves hissing apart like clam shells, and the floor groaning upwards. But the hydraulic winch wheezes and stops, barely at the roof line. I look out on a sea of suburban shingles. I know what the producers will say. Could it be higher. The neighbors will still hear. Where is the magic. I flip the winch to manual and I crank it tall, taller. It rises above the neighborhood. I attach helium stabilizers. The room teeters up and up. The camera watches me disappear. I'm building by myself. The air is wet and cold around me; I'm rising through the cloud layer. I add blinking lights on poles to the platform, to ward off aircraft. The air is getting thinner.

Finally I'm alone. I shiver on my platform, creaking and shimmying, air condensing as I exhale. The reveal will work. The producers will be happy. I can go back down and finalize the room.

But I pause for a moment, swaying up above the world. I look down at the mosaic of lights below, each a home, a life, a problem, a cozy bungalow. Each with its own catastrophe hidden in its walls. Fog obscures it all for a moment. I can see the curvature of the Earth. Above me, stars. Brighter than they've ever been. I clutch the winch. I keep winding up.

~ ~ ~

Sasha Brown lives near Boston with his wife, child and dog. He writes, gardens, and hikes with his kid, who helps with stories by suggesting that the characters should be ninjas. He's at sashabrownwriter.com

Empties

Del’s basement apartment smelled of smoke and liquor. What had begun as a thirtieth birthday party for Stupid Steve, Del’s old friend from New Brunswick, had dwindled down to about a dozen. I was one of them, but only because I was visiting from Victoria and was crashing on Del’s couch. What was left of Stupid Steve had been carted off in a taxi hours earlier.

I hadn’t seen Del in a year when he called me and invited me to visit him for a weekend. When he first got to the west coast, he worked with me at a faux-fancy restaurant in the inner harbor of Victoria that fleeced tourists. We had bonded over music and drinking, and jammed after work sometimes. We harmonized well. Since then, he had moved to Vancouver and we had more or less fallen out of touch. Until the call.

I was twenty-two. I had dropped out of university by then. I had worked at a vegetarian place in Bastion Square for a year, manning the cash register and weighing plates of food, then taking the money from the skinny old women or young hippies with cash to spare. Then I scored a union job as a page at the Victoria Public Library. I filed books away. If I played my cards right, one day I would be able to become a clerk. I lived with my mom and thought I’d save up some money and get my shit together and then maybe go back to school.

For his part, Del was happy working as a prep cook and drinking half his wages away every month. He lived in a tiny one-bedroom basement suite near Commercial and 2nd Avenue. In those days, you could still afford the rent working a normal job. He had joined a band since moving to Vancouver. They were called Ball Sweat. To me, they sounded derivative, a sort of sub-Dayglo Abortions. But they seemed to have some fans. A scene is a scene.

When the old hard-wired wall clock in the kitchen showed 2:30, Del demi-bowed to the weight of propriety and turned down the stereo to speaking volume. The family that lived upstairs would be grateful.

There were only six or seven other people still there, including Tam, a chain-smoking older veteran of the first wave of punk with thick eyeshadow and a listless, sprawling manner, and Dave.

Dave was part of a crew of punk kids who had arrived from the Fraser Valley somewhere—I honestly can’t remember where, but I want to say Chilliwack—and lived in a house up on Fraser and King Edward. Dave was into oi. He dressed in boots and braces. A bomber jacket. He had long sideburns. A flat cap, like you see on a Yorkie miner. From the neck up, he was a character out of the Depression: Young man populating breadline. He was a plasterer, one of thousands helping to build the thick forest of condo towers beginning to sprout up around False Creek.

I sat next to him and rolled a smoke. He leaned in to talk to me. He needn’t have. The music was quieter by then.

“Del tells me you’re some kind of socialist.” He slurred the last two words so badly that they sounded like a Gaelic surname.

“Sure, I guess.” I had attended a few Trotskyist meetings when I was at UVic.

“Fucken-eh right,” he said and extended his hand. I shook it and he didn’t let go at first. “Solidarity!”

I nodded. The handshake ended. “You’re in a union?” I asked.

He nodded. “OPCMIA local 919.” It sounded like he was a captured soldier reading off a serial number.

“OPC…? I said.

“MIA,” Dave finished. He closed his eyes and then said, nodding his head like the moon over a tossing ship. “Operative Plasterers’ and Cement Masons’ International Association.”

“Oh,” I said. “That sounds quite grand.”

His eyes narrowed. “You busting my chops?”

“No,” I said.

Cocksparrer had given way to Sham 69. All the oldies.

He reached for a can of beer. Labatt Blue. A workingman’s drink. He pulled out a pack of smokes: Craven A. Official cigarette of the proletariat.

“Well, you’ve never seen such a great fucking union.” He drank and then raised the can. “To my brothers!” he said. The few people left at the party looked at us. Tam smirked and turned her head.

Del was in the kitchen. He raised his own drink. “And your sisters!” he said. Dave ignored him and leaned into me.

“You in a union?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I work at the library. Over in Victoria.”

His face darkened. “Oh. So what’s that? CUPE? BCGEU?”

“CUPE,” I said. I knew where this was going. I’d heard this same shit from my uncle Steve who worked at the Gorge Road Mill and was a shop steward when he wasn’t getting pissed at the Halfway House.

“Well now, a lot of the guys don’t think that’s a real union.” He turned and took another swig.

“Sure,” I said. “The old public and private sector debate.” I drank from my can of Kokanee. “A union is a union, though. They protect you and they protect me.” My cigarette dropped its cherry. I had done a shitty job rolling it. I stamped on it. The embers died on the already scarred linoleum floor.

“Right,” Dave said. He took another sip and then put his can down among the dozens of empties on the sprawling glass-topped coffee table. “Just so long,” he said slowly, “as you remember who built the fucking unions in the first place.”

I raised my can. “To the librarians,” I said.

He blinked at me for a second, and then started to laugh. He opened another Labatt Blue. Foam fizzed out from the tab.

“Yeah,” he said and toasted the room. “To the fucking librarians!”

We drank. Dave upended the whole can in a few seconds. He made as if to crumple it up, but then stopped.

“Say,” he said. “You ever stack cans?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “You know, on top of each other. See how high you can get.”

“You mean with empties?”

“That’s right, with empties.”

“No.”

“It’s pretty fun.”

“Well, show me.”

Del, sitting nearby, watched us, a glass in his hand. The music had been changed again. Kind of Blue. Party’s ending music.

“You got a tenner?” Dave said.

I nodded. “Yes,” I said.

“K,” Dave replied. He began to clear space on the ashtray and drink-covered coffee table. “We build on this table. One tower each. Tallest tower wins.”

“In that case,” I said, “we should start on the floor.”

Dave paused and smiled slowly.  “Sure,” he said.

And so he and I each took an end and moved the coffee table against the wall next to the bathroom. Cans and rolling papers fell off like sailors diving from a garbage barge. Del and the other few remaining partygoers gathered round to watch the competition. Everyone helped gather empty beer cans, even dumping some of the undrunk beer and cider into the clogged kitchen sink.

Del had us stand on either side of him like boxers. He staggered standing still.

“Ladies and other ladies,” he began. “I bring to you the 1993 can stacking championship, East Vancouver edition!” There were some muted cheers. Miles blew the blues incongruously. “In this corner” he said, raising my hand, “we have Ryan McGinn, a library clerk from the Garden City!” Some slow clapping.

“And in that corner,” he said, “we have Dave… what’s your last name, anyway?”

“Bastone,” Dave said. I couldn’t tell whether he was chuffed or annoyed.

“Dave Bastone, plasterer and union brother extraordinaire.” The clapping was a little louder.

“Home court advantage,” I said to Dave.

“Fucken right,” he answered.

“Gentlemen,” Del finished, “begin!”

Each of us had a pile of cans, thanks to the efforts of the others. We began to stack them, taking turns. Del made wisecracks until the fourth can when Dave told him to stop and he did. The conversation died down around us.

I was drunk; Dave was drunker. He nearly sent his tower tumbling twice on the tenth story. He stacked with a reckless confidence. As he did, he would shift his flat cap. His sideburns stuck out in wispy strands. He had a boy’s face, smooth and open.

We were at fifteen or so cans, head-height. We had been at it for a few minutes. The little group was silent now. Nobody else had left since we’d begun. I suppose it was riveting.

I succeeded in laying a can to catch up with Dave, and then laid another to up the ante. As he adjusted his cap, he gave me a little nod. His tongue protruded from his lips. The Lucky Lager can in his right hand creaked as he repeatedly squeezed and released, as though he were massaging a robot heart. His eyes never moved from his tower as he swiftly brought his arm up and planted the can. The tower swayed drunkenly and then remained standing.

“Not bad,” I said.

Dave shook his head impatiently. “Still a tie.”

Del mimed a drum roll as Dave eyeballed his next layer. This time, he moved much more slowly, holding the Kokanee can by the tab and lowering it crane-like onto the top of the increasingly unsteady structure, which trembled like a string of agitated nerves but still stood.

“Wow, Dave,” Del said.

“Okay librarian,” said Dave. “Let’s see what you can do.”

I selected a Labatt Blue. Unlike Dave’s tower, a hodge-podge of different brands stacked willy-nilly, my tower was coordinated into three-can tiers of individual brands: Carlsberg green, Molson white, Lucky red and now Labatt blue.

“Nice colors,” Dave said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Being sarcastic.”

“Thanks for that, also.”

The others watched us.

“Still your turn.”

I said nothing. I bit my bottom lip.

“What’s the matter, library man?”

“I’m worried I might run out of blue cans,” I said and placed it on the top. I quickly grabbed another.

If I knocked my tower down, all Dave would need to do would be add another can. With me unable to answer, the game would be over with me as the loser. My drunken skin felt hot with the possibility.

I calibrated. The ceiling was only eight feet. Assuming I could place this can, we had another five, six tops, before running out of room. I turned to Del.

“I need another color,” I said.

“Sir, yes sir!” he said, giving me a smart salute. For once, his garrison boots were appropriate to the situation. In an instant, he was rummaging around the kitchen, making an ungodly noise in the process. He came back in with three cans.

“What color is Beck’s?” he asked.

Tam said, “Beck’s color.” She lit a smoke, her hundredth of the night.

“Here you go, skipper.” Del placed them on the coffee table. I nodded.

“Find more,” I said.

I took my last blue can and placed it. My fingers trembled. The can gave a little spasm as my hand pulled away, and then the wobbling spread to the other cans. The little audience keened in unison and then exhaled as one when the shaking finally stopped and my tower still stood, now one can taller than Dave’s.

“The reputation of private sector unions rests on your shoulders, my friend,” I said. “Don’t make all your brothers look stupid.”

Dave shook his head. “You’ve got a mouth, don’t you?”

“It’s part of the human condition,” I said. “Having a mouth.”

He placed the can. It didn’t wobble. It looked like it was magnetized. It perched there, defiantly still.

There was a golf-like smattering of applause.

“Not much further before we need to make a hole in the ceiling,” Del said. “How will you call a winner if both of your towers are still standing and you run out of room?”

I turned to Dave and said, “Well?”

He touched his cap again. His fingers moved in fussy arcs across the brim. “Okay,” he said. “If we tie, it’s back to the bottom sudden-death.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said.

Del clapped his hands. Cigarette in mouth, Tam turned the music down even more. Smoke billowed around her head.

“Well,” I said to Dave.

He nodded and held his hands out to the sides like a fakir facing a cobra. He stared at the top of his tower. He brought his hands together, the can between them, an offering propitiated to some indifferent god. “Well,” he said. He put the can on the tower. It didn’t shake. It stood.

I didn’t wait for them to react. I took a can of Becks and placed it on the tower, fully expecting it to fall. When it didn’t, I grabbed another can. It was still half-full. I passed it to Del.

“Sorry sensei,” he said, passing me another. I immediately added it to the stack. Learning from Dave. Decisive.

It wobbled and then stopped. Even though it was only a can taller than Dave’s, my tower looked impossible. The gap above would hold only a few more.

Dave blew air out of his cheeks and stepped up to his tower. Almost casually, he raised the can over his head, like a baseball pitch in the slowest of slow motion. The can—Lucky Lager—was soon sitting there and our towers were the same height.

It was a tie.

Dave had another can. Molson Canadian. A classic, crisp, easy-drinking lager. They used to brew it next to the Burrard Bridge and you could smell the yeast from a mile away. He stood there. He looked very young in his alligator shirt and flat cap, a boy trying to dress like his father’s idea of what a man should be.

And then he placed the can on top of the tower.

My neck twitched. The can stood. There was no movement down the tower.  At first.

But then things changed. A slight shaking, as subtle as heat distortions rising from hot asphalt, began in the center of the tower. It looked like a team of tiny workers were jackhammering girders in there, like the Mohawk men who built Manhattan. The Canadian can seemed to be the only part of the tower not moving. But then the top of Dave’s tower also began to sway. The little crowd inhaled as one. Dave stood there. His hands were extended like a wizard’s. His skin was so pale his knuckles blushed. His mouth moved but no sound came out.

“Is it…?” Del began.

And the tower fell. Cans bounced and rolled across the floor. One bumped the base of my tower, which shook a little but stood true. The little group looked at Dave uncertainly. The clatter of the cans died away.

Del took both of our hands.

“And the winner is Ryan McGinn, to the greater glory of CUPE members everywhere!” He lifted my hand. There were some weak cheers and the spectacle was over. People began to leave. Tam turned the stereo off. She puffed more smoke. From behind, it looked like her face was on fire.

Dave and I stood in front of our towers, mine intact and Dave’s lying at our feet.

“Pretty good,” he said.

“I try.”

“You know,” he said, “I’ve done this many times. Never lost until today.”

I extended my hand. “Good game,” I said. He considered it for a moment and then shook.

“Yeah,” he said. He turned away and grabbed a pack of smokes from the coffee table then lit one. He held out the pack. “Smoke?”

“Sure.” I lit up and we smoked in the shadow of my tower, just two guys being guys together.

“You’re wrong about public sector unions being the same,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“I go on strike, it hurts my boss. You go on strike, it hurts everyone.” He took another drag.

Del was watching us. His eyes were bird-like, dark, nervous. Tam stood beside him. She had a fresh smoke in her mouth. She struck a wooden match.

“Whatever you say, man,” I said. “I’m just building towers made of cans over here.”

Dave adjusted his cap. He stood still for a moment, considering, and then kicked the base of my tower. Cans went everywhere. Our ruins mingled. Del took a step toward us. Tam took the lit cigarette out of her mouth.

Dave looked at me. He swayed with beer. His young flat face shone with feeling. “Looks like your tower fell over,” he said. He took two five dollar bills out of his pocket and tossed them to the floor. Two sets of Wilfred Laurier’s eyes stared at the low basement ceiling.

Dave left the apartment, slamming the door behind him. Del and I cleaned up the cans as Tam smoked another two cigarettes.

~ ~ ~

Sean Maschmann lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he teaches history at Langara College. His work has also appeared in Fourteen Hills. You can find him at seanmaschmann.com

The Lady Doctor

Dr. Hasina Rasheed had been excited to be invited to her first party in Houston, where she was visiting her daughter, but within minutes of entering the drawing room of the monstrous house in Sugarland, she was shepherded to a small alcove to the side by the hostess, with the words, “Aunty, sit here. I invited my other friends’ mothers so you would have company.” The hostess (what was her name? Dina? Mina?) was a frail, young thing, short and thin with a pale, slender face. Dr. Rasheed thought that her eyes were set too wide apart.

Hasina Rasheed herself towered above every other woman at the party, and even some of the men. At five foot eight, she cut a majestic figure, with broad shoulders, a long neck, and a large head. When her husband, the other Dr. Rasheed, had been alive, she had carefully abstained from wearing high heels so she would not tower above him. Now that she had grown stout in her middle age, she cut an imperious figure.

“Here, Aunty, sit. This is Jharna Bhabi’s mother,” the hostess (Dina?) said, almost pushing Dr. Rasheed down on a high dining chair next to a fat woman shrouded in an ashy silk sari and an ugly gray shawl.

Dr. Hasina Rasheed took one look at the woman’s garments and decided that they were very impractical. The poor woman seemed hobbled by all the loose, floating garments of her get-up. Since arriving in Houston, Dr. Rasheed had traded the starched, cotton saris she wore to her medical practice in Dhaka for shalwar kameez suits of a synthetic material that required no ironing or starch. She had had the three-piece outfits tailored hastily at a shop at Gawsia Market before flying to the US. She was dressed in a shalwar kameez now, a practical outfit that left her arms and legs free to move swiftly.

“I will bring you some appetizers here, Aunty…,” Dina, or Mina, said.

“My name is not Aunty!” Hasina Rasheed barked. This was the third time the hostess had addressed her in this manner. “Call me Dr. Rasheed. I am a lady doctor. A gynecologist.”

“Oh!” The hostess smiled with a simple, unintelligent expression on her face.

“What is your name?” Hasina Rasheed demanded.

“Pinky.”

“Pinky, do you know what kind of doctor a gynecologist is? I have treated thousands of women like you in my career.”

“Yes, Aunty,” Pinky said sweetly, smiling with a toothy grin and a vacant look in her eyes.

Gay laughter exploded in the drawing room, where there was evidently much excitement afoot. Dr. Rasheed had been having a great time there consorting with three smartly dressed young women, sitting next to them on the deep sofas, asking them what they each did and expounding on the current political situation in Bangladesh, when she had been so rudely pulled away and exiled to this dead corner.

“Excuse me, Aunty,” Pinky said, “I’m just coming.”  

After Pinky had hurried off, Dr. Rasheed crossed her arms, rubbing them in the chilled room, and glanced at her wordless companion. “Salam.” She nodded curtly to the dowdy figure seated beside her. “What is your name?”

“I am Jharna’s mother,” the old lady mumbled.

“I don’t know who Jharna is. I asked you what your name is. Speak up! You’re not a  little girl anymore. What do you do?”  

“I don’t do anything,” Jharna’s mother said, glancing up with a fearful look in her eye, before going back to spooning her appetizer (a grayish-brown mush of chotpoti) out of a Styrofoam bowl with a white, plastic spoon.

“Plastic is bad for you,” Hasina Rasheed said, attempting to make conversation with Jharna’s mother one more time.

Jharna’s mother nodded her head up and down, smiling timidly, her eyes glistening with moisture.

Hasina Rasheed made a decision. Life was too short. She would not be deterred from seeking out the joy she could have while she still had time. Rising from her chair, she marched back to the drawing room.

Several young women seated on the brown leather sofas cried out in delight at seeing her again. “There she is! Aunty, we were talking about you, what a grand time we had chatting with you!”

The three young women Dr. Rasheed had been chatting with earlier, Sonia, Lilly, and Bithi, were very smart looking, with red highlights in their hair (layered and puffed up in identical styles), dressed in silky caftans paired with tapered Western pants, and high-heeled, open-toed sandals. They all carried fashionable purses, which they pressed daintily against their laps as they sat.

“I was having fun, too, my dears!” Hasina Rasheed settled down beside the giggling women. “Imagine, Pinky put me in that room with that other woman, someone’s mother, just because we’re the same age. Does Pinky think I have to talk to an old woman just because I’m old also? No, I enjoy your company. We’re like-minded. I was enjoying our conversation so much. You are all very intelligent. That’s how young women should be, intelligent and interesting. Don’t you think?”

“Oh, Auntie, you flatter me!” Sonia cried. She was taller than the other two, slim and upright with a thin face and hollow, rouged cheeks. “I will never forget such a compliment, that you, being such a great doctor, called me intelligent.”

“I speak the truth!” Hasina Rasheed cried gaily. “But do you know what? To help your brain, you must take B12 regularly. Do you take B12?”

“Oh. No, I didn’t know. B12? I’ll make sure to take it,” Bithi said. She had a round, apple-shaped face, with pretty, dyed bangs covering her forehead.

The floor of the drawing room was depressed from the level of the dining room and kitchen. Big paintings hung on all the walls in the darkened room. The paintings had no pictures, just colors and shapes, the kind of art one would see at a bank in Bangladesh. The sofa was a brown leather sectional, with a holder for all the remote controls. A large television set mounted on the wall above an electric fireplace showed a song and dance sequence from a Hindi film, with the volume turned down low.

As she chatted with the young women, Dr. Rasheed watched her daughter Munia sitting quietly on one end of the sofa, watching the TV screen with deep concentration. Munia’s body had grown plump recently. Her kameez looked about to burst under her arms and at her sides. With a pang, Hasina Rasheed noticed that a few gray hairs had sprouted at the front of Munia’s scalp, an effect of the recent stresses in her life.

“Hallo.” A reedy woman with a long chin approached Munia and plopped down beside her with a lively bounce. “We haven’t met. I’m Shompa. Do you have kids? I heard you mention to someone that you have two kids?” She spoke in a breathy, singsong voice, dangling her long neck toward Munia and casting her a blinding smile, gazing out of protuberant eyes. When she moved, the stones on her shalwar kameez sparkled and shone.

“They’re on visit,” poor Munia mumbled, her eyes fixed on the television set. The light from the screen flickered over her ashy face in the dark room, throwing shadows.

“What?” Shompa said in a confused tone. “I don’t understand.”

“Visit. They’re on visit,” Munia repeated in a pained voice.

“What does that mean?” Shompa asked loudly.

A few heads turned to look at the two women.

“They’re with their dad. He has visitation rights today,” Munia said, sitting up stiffly, her eyes still trained on the TV screen.

“She’s divorced!” Hasina Rasheed cried from across the room, to stop the tide of interrogation.

As she spoke, the color mounted Munia’s face, rising from her chin to her forehead, flaming her features.

“Is that your daughter?” Sonia asked Dr. Rasheed. “I had no idea that Munia is your daughter, Aunty!”  

“I’m so sorry about what happened, Aunty,” Bithi said, lowering her head and speaking in a soft voice. Her cheeks dimpled with compassion. “We heard a little bit about your daughter’s misfortune, Aunty. So many times, we saw her come to a party crying. If we only knew that her husband was mistreating her.”

“What happened? I didn’t hear anything?” Lilly leaned forward, placing a hand on her chin. Her face glowed with curiosity. 

“Her husband abused her. He beat her. Not once, but several times,” Dr. Hasina Rasheed confided in her young friends. “He threatened to beat the children also. They are small, you know. Two boys. Just one and three years old. So, I had to come to Houston to rescue my daughter.”

The three women nodded rapidly, their eyes dancing.

“When I came here, I took one look at the situation, and I told my daughter to get a divorce. Now I am staying with her and taking care of her and the children.”

“So sad, Aunty,” Sonia said, shaking her head sympathetically.

“It was so good of you to come and take care of her. She needed you, Aunty, and you came,” Bithi said.

“Do you know what? He is good for nothing,” Hasina Rasheed said, warming to the young women’s sympathetic looks. “So what if he is an engineer? My daughter is a doctor also.” As she spoke, she imagined that she would be great friends with these women. She would tell Munia to invite them, so that they could all have tea together.

Sonia bent her neck to examine Lilly’s diamond ring. Her black caftan glistened in the dim light of the room, the fabric falling in shimmers across her arms. “How many karats is it, Lilly?” Sonia asked.

Lilly named a number. Bithi also began to examine the ring, taking Lilly’s hand in hers. The three women became engrossed in a discussion about a jeweler in Hillcroft. Hasina Rasheed stared at them with a look of confusion. Her lips curled downward, and her eyes darted around the dark room.

“Hey, do you all want to watch the latest Shahrukh Khan song?” Pinky asked, entering the drawing room from the kitchen.

“Yes! Yes!” the room exploded with excited cries.

Pinky shook her hair out, sending notes of a creamy fragrance across the room, and picked up the remote control, cradling it among her blood-red nails.

“Turn the volume up, Pinky,” Sonia suggested.

“Good idea,” Pinky said.

Another song and dance routine materialized on the TV screen. Shahrukh Khan was dancing with a smooth-faced, willowy young actress whom Dr. Rasheed did not recognize. With flared nostrils and shining eyes, the women in the room watched the larger-than-life figures on the screen. Dr. Rasheed sat upright, maintaining proper posture, and stared at the spectacle that everyone else seemed to be enjoying. Someone must have opened a window, because a draft of cool air blew over Dr. Rasheed’s arms, making her shudder through the nylon sleeves of her kameez. She wished she had not handed her coat at the door.

“A bug! A moth!” someone shrieked. “Who left the door open and let in a moth?”

After the song ended, the three young women seated beside Hasina Rasheed continued to talk among themselves, not paying her any attention. Hasina Rasheed listened to them intently, trying to follow their conversation and waiting for a good opportunity to jump in. A long time passed. Her face settled into heavy folds. Her body sank into the recesses of the overly soft sofa. She sat up straight, drawing her back tall. If there was one thing she feared, it was her body going soft.

Pinky reappeared in the dark room and announced that the men had taken their food. It was the women’s turn to serve themselves. The women sprang up and headed to the kitchen, picking up the thin paper plates stacked on the kitchen island. Dr. Rasheed noticed that her poor daughter still sat on the sofa in the dark, her arms crossed across her tight bodice and her eyes fixed on the TV screen. Hasina Rasheed rose from her sofa with a struggle and walked across the room to her daughter.

“You won’t eat?” she asked, bending low and bringing her lips close to Munia’s face, ministering to her the way she used to when Munia had been little, or when Munia had been a medical student studying for her exams with two pigtails framing her narrow, dusky face with those large black eyes.

Munia shook her head tightly. Hasina Rasheed noticed that her daughter was crying. Specks of tears glinted on top of Munia’s shiny face powder. Her hair was thinning and the skin on her forehead was dull and flaking. The tinsel figures on the screen gyrated to cheerful music, throwing bright lights on the walls and across the surfaces of the paintings. Dr. Rasheed remembered the moment of her daughter’s birth. Despite being a doctor, she had been terrified, screaming for narcotics. Her doctor friends and her doctor husband had surrounded her. A few minutes after Munia was born and suckled at her breast, she had fallen asleep, shutting her eyes from blissful exhaustion.  

Hasina Rasheed straightened and marched to the kitchen, where she found Pinky dishing pulau out of a gigantic pot on the stove using a saucer, her blood-red nails and the thin gold bracelet on her wrist covered with oily rice grains.

“I have to leave, Pinky!” Dr. Rashid cried in a loud voice, drawing herself tall and pulling up her chin. “We have to leave on my account. I have taken a job at CVS pharmacy, to relieve my boredom, you know. I have to show up at work this evening. I must take Munia with me, I’m afraid, since I don’t drive.”

A young woman with a dusky face, a diamond stud on her bulbous nose and her hair piled on top of her head in a bun, carried a plate of food to Dr. Rasheed’s erstwhile companion in the gray sari and shawl, who was still sitting obediently in the alcove. The younger woman bent her face to the older woman as she handed the plate to her, pressing her lips to the old woman’s right ear. So this must be Jharna, Dr. Rasheed said to herself.

“Aunty, are you sure you won’t eat?” Pinky asked.

Dr. Rasheed was taken aback by the sincere tone of Pinky’s voice. “No, no. Another time. Thank you for inviting us, Pinky. Beautiful house…”

Her voice booming through the house, Dr. Rasheed took her good-byes from all the women, including her three young friends, Sonia, Lilly, and Bithi, who avowed their disappointments in loud voices. Then she shepherded her poor, broken daughter out of the house, pulling her along by the arm. Standing in the cold air outside, she pulled on the puffy pink jacket she had bought at Bongo Bazar in Bangladesh, where surplus and rejected clothes from the garments industry were sold. Munia stood beside her, tugging her tight green velvet jacket around her girth.

“Good-bye. Good-bye!” Pinky cried from the door.

Climbing inside the Toyota Camry, Munia blasted the heat and the fan.

“Take off your jacket,” Dr. Rasheed said. “Won’t you take off your jacket? You will be warm!”  

Munia ignored her. Pinky waved and shouted good-byes from the door. Dr. Rasheed waved back frantically, lowering the glass. Munia hit the indicator, swerved out of the parking space, and circled the cul-de-sac. When the car came around to the house again, Pinky was still standing at the front door, her sari and gold jewelry scintillating under the porch light.

“She’s waving. Wave back,” Dr. Rasheed said, raising her own hand.

“Munia?”

Tears were flowing down Munia’s cheeks. Dr. Rasheed stared at her daughter and then turned back to her window, pursing her mouth. All Munia ever did was cry. She had been a housewife to her engineer husband. Even after the divorce, she had not bothered to look for a job although she had trained as a doctor in Bangladesh, as Dr. Rasheed kept reminding her. Dr. Rasheed sighed and stared into the dark night at the passing shops with bright signs.

When they reached Munia’s house, in the same subdivision and only a few blocks away from Pinky’s house, Munia parked the Toyota inside the garage, then opened the door and climbed out without a word to Dr. Rasheed, slipping inside the house. Hasina Rasheed sat inside the car for some minutes, enjoying the bright light and quiet hum of the warm garage. At last, she emerged slowly out of the vehicle, closing the passenger-side door, and walked past the stacked plastic storage bins that had not been unpacked yet. She did, indeed, have work later that evening at the pharmacy, but not till eleven. She would rest a little, perhaps drink a cup of tea and think about her pleasant conversation with her three friends at the party, Sonia, Bithi, and Lilli, who spoke and laughed so gaily. Laughter was very good for health. It produced gamma brain waves. Dr. Rasheed wished that Munia would laugh more.

Entering the house, she could hear Munia sobbing. Dr. Rasheed tightened her sari about her waist and marched through the dark house. Munia’s ex-husband had kept their house in the Woodlands. Dr. Hasina Rasheed had bought this house herself for her daughter, with her own money. It was a modest house, with two bedrooms and one bathroom, with one room for Munia and the kids and one for herself. Parking herself outside Munia’s bedroom, Dr. Rasheed placed her ear against the door and heard piteous howls, rising and falling. Opening the door, she found the room in darkness. Munia sat on the bed, a dark mound, her cellphone pressed tightly to her ear.

“I want to come back. Please!” Munia’s eyes were squeezed shut and she was speaking in a hushed, desperate voice.

“What are you doing? Are you speaking to your husband again? That scoundrel?” Hasina Rasheed marched to the bed and yanked the cellphone away from her daughter. Pressing the red button to end the call, she held the phone behind her back, standing in front of her daughter and panting. “Have you gone mad? Why do you want to go back to him?” she shouted.

“Who will want me now?” Munia wailed. “I’m thirty-four years old, an old woman! No one wants me.” She sniffed loudly, rubbing her inflamed nose. Dirty tears ran down her cheeks.

“You’re not old!” Hasina Rasheed cried. “I’m still young, and you’re my daughter!”

“I want him back!”

“No! You cannot go back to him!” Hasina Rasheed said firmly. Her voice was deep and authoritative, the way it used to ring out in the corridor of the hospital. She felt reassured by it.

“You did this!” Munia cried, twisting her body violently to face Dr. Rasheed. “You ruined everything! You made me get a divorce. You should leave!” Her face contorted in an ugly way, elongating her mouth and puffing her cheeks, and enlarging the whites of her eyes.

“I only want to help,” Dr. Rasheed said.

“You can’t help me!” Munia sobbed. Her shoulders heaving, she covered her face in her hands and bent her head low. She was still wearing her heavy jacket on top of the synthetic outfit, and she smelled slightly of sweat. 

Dr. Rasheed hesitated, then cleared her throat and said softly, “You know, Munia, if you lose some weight, you would look so pretty again.”   

Then, when Munia did not answer, she said, “Will you drive me to CVS later?”

Thinking of her work later that evening and the limited time she had to rest before her shift, Hasina Rasheed retreated, closing her daughter’s bedroom door softly behind her and taking the cellphone with her. Walking into the bathroom, she turned on the light, depositing the phone on the sink counter. She was trembling. Did Munia really mean that she had ruined her life? Did Munia want her to return to Bangladesh?

Dr. Rasheed took short breaths, seized with panic. For years, she had been coming to America for a few months at a time to maintain her green card status, but this time she had assumed that she was coming to live here forever. She had retired from her position as a gynecologist at PG Hospital and sold her house in Dhaka, and all her furniture with it, and packed up to move to Houston permanently, for her daughter’s sake.  

At night, when the children and Munia had fallen asleep and Dr. Rasheed had retired to her own bed and put her head on her pillow, she missed her patients. She saw them in her dreams. She had been a tough doctor. Her massive frame had moved swiftly through the corridors, braced by a corset and safety pins, her voice booming. Oh, how those patients had worshipped her, how they had looked at her with eager, shining eyes and open mouths, pressing her hand in their thin, bony fingers.

For the last few months, she had taken her grandchildren to the nearby park to play, holding the elder one by the hand and carrying the younger one on her back. If she tried to put the one she was carrying down on the ground, he cried, “But Nani, I am little. You have to carry me!” She had fed them and read to them and let them caress her face with their fluttering, feathery fingers.

“You have small ears,” the three-year-old had said to Dr. Rasheed once. “Your skin is too loose.”

“Yes! I’m a wolf!” she had teased him. “And I’m going to eat you!”

She liked to think that she had made their lives a little better. She had envisioned a life of sweet moments with Munia and the two boys, eating at McDonald’s, the boys’ favorite restaurant, going grocery shopping together with her daughter, picking out the good okra, and sitting in the late afternoon, drinking tea. Now that plan also included the young women at the party, her new friends, so attractive and smart, with whom she had talked so energetically at Pinky’s party. Perhaps she could arrange to have a picnic with them sometime at the nice park beside Munia’s house, or they could go for a walk together, on the sparkling streets of Sugarland.

But now Dr. Rasheed remembered that Sonia, Lilly, and Bithi had lost interest in her at the party. They had stopped listening when she had been her most animated self, telling an interesting story about her daughter’s divorce. It was very confusing. At first, they had appeared so interested in her. Had they only been pretending to be interested then? Had they been poking fun at her? Dr. Rasheed felt hurt and confused by their behavior. Why had they stopped speaking to her?

She examined her face in the mirror, widening her eyes. Her cheeks were inflamed, and the sides of her mouth had lost their elasticity and settled in thick lines like craters. When she opened her mouth, her teeth were stained, with gaps between them. Perhaps it was the light? She turned on another light. Lifting her cold hands to her cheeks, she removed her glasses and peered once more at her reflection, moving closer to the mirror, recalling the young women at the party who had sparkled all evening, the bright rouge on their plump cheeks, and their glittering purses, highlighted hair, stiletto heels, and painted nails, and she saw, at last, how they saw her.

~ ~ ~

Gemini Wahhaj’s novel Mad Man will be published in Fall 2023 by 7.13 Books. She is Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, Concho River Review, Scoundrel Time, Chicago Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, Allium, Valley Voices, and other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the Cambor/Inprint fellowship and the James A. Michener award for fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine).